


Green Menace

by lyricwritesprose



Series: Female Doctor Experiments [3]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Body Horror, Cliffhanger, Experiment, Finished Story, Gen, features a Classic monster but I'm not saying which one it is, not that this particular story features much in the way of a female Doctor, regeneration story, the next story IS finished and it does not end on a cliffhanger, this is the setup, to see how it felt writing a female Doctor, wrote this before Jodie Whittaker was cast
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:42:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21826903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose
Summary: This is a prelude to a few female Doctor fics that I wrote before Jodie Whittaker was cast, to see what writing a female Doctor felt like and whether it was much different.  This is the regeneration story for an unspecified male Doctor who finds himself on a space station that may be a galactic museum—but is definitely dangerous.
Series: Female Doctor Experiments [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1243505
Comments: 14
Kudos: 21





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I originally conceived of this as a full-blown "series," and then didn't write the earliest installment. Background information needed: the original companion, Kishallon, is a relative of Raffalo from "End of the World," a blue person intended for service who broke away from her intended role in life, flunked out of university, joined a cult, left the cult when it became obvious that they were absolutely deadly, and met the Doctor along the way.
> 
> This particular story starts in the very far future, some five hundred years after "The End of the World," on an observation station. Since a writer doesn't have a special effects budget, I might as well go hog wild with the science fiction. This story also features a Classic monster, and so serves as my musings on how they could be updated for modern _Who._ Really, I changed very little about them.
> 
> This particular story doesn't have much female Doctor stuff in it, but it is an essential prelude to the next story. It is also a cliffhanger, but this story as well as the next story _are_ finished, and thus will not be abandoned.

“I’m very, very certain,” Kishallon hissed to the Doctor, “that I’m not supposed to be here.”

The Doctor, for his part, seemed perfectly at ease in a party of rich and powerful people—of course, he technically out-ranked the lot of them, but Kishallon was the only one who knew that. The Doctor appropriated two scent-bulbs from a passing tray and handed one to Kishallon. “Bareface your way through,” he said, “is my advice.”

The Palatinate Junction was dedicating the first ringworld of a new Brocade. Any moment now, the subspace shunt would begin pouring matter into space, and from there, it would be sculpted by specialized fireweavers. It was supposed to be an unforgettable sight. Any excitement Kishallon might have felt was eclipsed by the certainty that someone’s hand was going to land on her shoulder, very hard and very suddenly. “Doctor,” she said, “this station is _run by the Grand Service.”_

“Ah.” The Doctor, Kishallon realized, actually hadn’t thought of that. “I see.”

“I was _discarded_ by the Grand Service. I’m,” she dropped her voice even more, “an Indigo-grade Utility.”

“Yes, you are.”

“And that means—“ 

_“The first fires of creation,”_ an announcer said, _“iron and carbon from the hearts of two different stars. Light will reach the viewing platform in three—two—one.”_

There wasn’t cheering. There was a sort of general sigh as flame bloomed in the viewing window. It was bubbly, like Kishallon imagined lava might be. Of course, she’d been created in the Jagget Brocade; before Xycor, befores she’d joined a cult and left a cult and started traveling with the Doctor, she’d never gone anywhere as exotic as a planet, and you couldn’t find lava off of one.

_“The iron and carbon will be combined with trace elements to form dysonium, the primary material of a ringworld. The fireweavers will spin fibers of dysonium around the host star.”_

Plasma wings, whiter and brighter than the molten carbon and iron, flashed past the viewing window, and there was another sigh from the assembled dignitaries. Despite herself, Kishallon leaned forward. A fireweaver, now—she had drunk datamists about fireweavers, but never actually seen—

A hard hand landed on her shoulder.

“It’s a good thing,” the Doctor said meditatively, “that we’re five hundred years too late for Lady Cassandra. She would have got herself invited to something like this, and . . .”

Kishallon didn’t get to hear what Lady Cassandra would have done. She was being pulled away by the Steward of the station.

She didn’t resist. There wasn’t much point in resisting. As it was, she could pretend that she was being guided aside for some urgent matter; if she resisted, the Steward was perfectly justified in simply incinerating her. Which would probably cause a stir, but that wasn’t much consolation to the person being incinerated—

“I have never,” the Steward hissed near her ear, “ever—ever!—witnessed anything as improper as this! _What are you doing here?”_

There were no responses that would get Kishallon out of trouble, and only a few that would mitigate it. “Attending with my—“ What could the Doctor be, that would make Kishallon’s presence tolerable?

“I did _not_ give you permission to speak!”

No, he hadn’t. He had asked a direct question, and Kishallon had taken it as implicit permission—Kishallon was sloppy, that’s what it was, and getting sloppier in her association with the Doctor. The reason the Grand Service would never have let her onto a high-prestige station like this: she was bad at the protocols.

“I will see you terminated for this. With _extreme_ prejudice. Sneaking into a gathering of your betters—being out of uniform! I’ll see your _genetics_ removed from the database—“

“Hallo,” the Doctor said cheerfully, and not half as quiet as the Steward was being. “Would you like me to make a scene? I’m quite good at them.”

The Steward gave a sickly smile. “In a few moments,” he said, “of course, sir. This young woman has a message that she has to attend to—“

“Oh, I doubt that.”

“I assure you—“

“Because she’s _my_ young woman, you see.”

The Steward looked even more sickly, his blue skin going slightly ashen—probably the same color Kishallon was right now, come to think of it. “Sir,” he said, “there is no tactful way to say this. I’m afraid you may have been the victim of an abominable fraud. This, you see,” he shook Kishallon slightly, “is a—Utility.” He didn’t specify grade. Kishallon supposed that a Cerulean-grade Utility, for instance, would get the Steward in slightly less trouble—although the idea of any Utility somehow impersonating a better class of person was an embarrassment that many Grand Service administrators could conceivably lose their lives over, and maybe that was a way out of this, if the Steward thought he was going to be one of them— “The marks on the skin,” the Steward went on, “are very obvious to anyone with hexachromatic vision. The Grand Service apologizes—“

“No, it doesn’t, because I’m perfectly aware of my companion’s background.”

The Steward stiffened. Then he said, “May I see your identification, please?”

And then there was a lurch.

§

There wasn’t a moment of darkness. There wasn’t any sort of hiatus between one moment and the next. One instant, everything was going downhill with the Steward, and the next, everything was lit a sickly green color, and the Doctor was standing on the opposite side of Kishallon, putting something on her neck.

“That should do it, I think,” the Doctor said. “How do you feel?”

Kishallon looked around slowly.

The people in the room—including the Steward—were frozen in place. Most of them looked as if they had just been staggered by something. The lurch Kishallon had felt, maybe.

The light and fiery wings beyond the window were also frozen in place, which—no. That wasn’t a window anymore. It was a holographic display.

And the room was subtly different, too. The pattern around the window had gone from fern-brush to geometric. It wasn’t a pattern that was visible to anyone without hexachromatic vision, but Kishallon could see it, and she knew that it didn’t belong on this platform.

Assuming they were still on the platform. “Doctor,” Kishallon said, “what happened?” And then, because it was entirely too eerie, “Why are they—like this?” Even the Steward didn’t deserve to be frozen with his mouth half open. Were they aware of being stuck in time? Surely if they were, the Doctor would be more upset . . .

“We’re in a stasis field,” the Doctor said. “I just gave you a stasis blocker. Don’t lose it.”

Kishallon put her hand protectively over the bit of metal sticking to her neck. “Why are we in a stasis field?”

“Well, I assume whoever used the Time Scoop put us in one.”

“Who’s that?” Kishallon said.

“No idea. Nobody’s shown up yet.”

“Oh.” Another thing occurred to Kishallon. “You’re not wearing a stasis blocker.”

“Stasis is a function of time,” the Doctor said. “I’m immune. Although perhaps it would be best not to let on that I’m immune . . .” He rummaged in his pocket, producing an apple, a Fourier-Kgrathi wave modifier, a pencil, a yo-yo, and finally something which might or might not have been another stasis blocker. He put it on his neck. “Now. Turning off the stasis field, that’s the next thing. For stasis this generalized—you feel how dead and dense the air is?—we’re looking at projectors in the walls.”

“So this definitely isn’t Platform Seventeen,” Kishallon said.

The Doctor gave her a faintly incredulous look. “Keep _up,_ Kishallon.”

The Doctor didn’t like Kishallon to say _sorry, sir,_ so Kishallon didn’t. “Well, you said we’d traveled in time,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean we’ve traveled in space.”

“True, but in this case—“ The Doctor got his sonic screwdriver out and pointed the violet light at the walls. “I think we may have gone quite some distance. Something about the lurch.”

Kishallon followed him as he scanned. “Doctor,” she said, “is it absolutely necessary to take everyone out of stasis?”

“You don’t want to leave them like this, do you?”

“Not _indefinitely,”_ Kishallon said, “but they’re safe enough, aren’t they? And besides, the Steward—“

“The Steward,” the Doctor said, “is not on his platform, not on his home territory, and will have to go through me. I’m sorry, Kishallon. I didn’t realize how easily they’d spot you. The clothes make the woman, and all that.”

Kishallon was wearing a black jacket over a pure white shirt and a sort of black tied ribbon that went around her throat. It wasn’t the height of fashion in the Palatinate Junction, but she was pretty sure it was the height of fashion somewhere. It had that expensive feel. And on Kishallon, it looked like lipstick on a pricklepuss, because there were some things you couldn’t hide—at least, not from other Utilities. “I’m marked,” she said. “I thought you knew.”

“I keep telling you,” the Doctor said, “I’m not omniscient.”

“But you did know that something was going to happen at that party.”

“The thing about a Time Scoop,” the Doctor said, “is that if you trace it from _inside_ the Time Vortex, you can generally see where it’s about to scoop from. And I was lucky enough to catch this one—oh, _there you are._ Sneaky little thing.” The sonic’s noise intensified.

Then multiple people cried out as they recovered from the lurch, some of them nearly losing their footing, or falling out of their ornamental chairs. There was someone staggeringly important from Balhoon in the room, and they nearly toppled. There was an arachnoid very close to Kishallon, probably the least affected person in the room, but even he started smelling suddenly of lemon butter.

“My apologies,” the Steward said, raising his voice, and—to Kishallon’s eyes—trying not to look like he was frantically searching for the people who had (from his perspective) just vanished from his grasp. “A minor technical problem, easily remedied. If you’ll excuse me—“ He had found Kishallon, and glared daggers at her. “I’ll go see to it.”

“But,” one young humanish said, “what about the _window?”_

The hologram was still frozen. Of course. It had been part of the setup, whatever that setup was.

“Are you trying to pass off _holograms_ as the real thing?” That was the Balhoonian, instantly indignant.

The Steward stared at it. And then said, more faintly, “Minor technical problem. Minor technical problem. If you’ll excuse me—“

“This isn’t a minor technical problem,” the Balhoonian said, “this is fraud!”

The Steward had edged most of the way toward the door. “I promise I’ll see this remedied,” he said. “In the meantime, may I offer you more scents, from the— _what?”_ The Sky-grade Utility who had been carrying scent-bulbs on a tray was shaking her head frantically. “You have permission to speak,” the Steward added.

“The door, sir. It won’t open.”

“What?”

The Doctor was already moving, and scanned the Utility door with his sonic. “That’s because it isn’t a door,” he said. “It’s a dummy.”

 _“What?”_ The Steward wasn’t the only one asking the question; the Balhoonian was the loudest.

“Are we still on Platform Seventeen?” the young humanish asked, putting themself at the front of the crowd and facing the Doctor directly.

“That’s very good. That’s a good thirty seconds faster than I expected. What’s your name?”

They raised their chin. “Princex Tras En Liat of Telifi. I would appreciate an answer to the question, if you have it.”

“So would I,” the Steward said direly.

“Well, let’s find one, shall we?” The Doctor pivoted, scanning with the screwdriver. “There are two real doors in this room, one at either end. The one behind the Steward, over there—“

The Steward pulled the door open, and stared.

There were two simultaneous rushes—one, from the bolder partygoers, to see what he was staring at, and the other one to be behind _other_ partygoers in case it was something bad. Princex Tras managed to cut through the first part by proclaiming loudly, “All right, all right, let the man through.” They dropped their voice and added, “What’s your name?”

“I’m called the Doctor. Would you like a new title? I hereby proclaim you official Wrangler of Nobility.” The Doctor got to the front of the queue, followed closely by Kishallon, who was sticking to him like the stasis blocker. “Oh, look,” the Doctor said mildly. “A luxury train car from the Superstructure. And all the passengers in stasis, too.”

“What is going on?” The Steward turned to him. “What did you _do?_ Who are you? Why are you sabotaging this auspicious occasion?”

The Doctor considered him for a moment, head tilted slightly to the side. “I’m called the Doctor,” he said finally. “I specialize in temporal crimes. You are all victims of a Time Scoop, and we’re almost certainly nowhere near Platform Seventeen. Why our holding cells are modeled on the places we were scooped from—why nobody has been around to threaten us, or otherwise provide useful information—there, I know as little as you.”

Kishallon had finally got a glimpse into the train car next door. “Maybe,” she said, “we’re in a museum.”

The Steward turned on her and opened his mouth. The Doctor beat him to it. “Say that again.”

“A museum. All the museums I’ve ever downloaded have walk-through panoramas, and I know there are still physical museums in some places. What if, instead of letting you walk through virtually . . .”

“They snatch people,” the Doctor finished for her, “and set them up in a display. Well done.” He turned to the Steward. “Under no circumstances may you harass my assistant, Steward. I rely on her expertise.”

“Which is what,” the Steward ground out, “exactly?”

“Data archeology,” the Doctor said, with perfect honesty, “and general queries.”

“Isn’t ransom a more likely motive?” the Princex wondered.

“Isn’t this entirely too elaborate a setup for ransom? My dear, you must give up on _likely._ I find that the universe is made up of _unlikely,_ to the point where you’re unlikely to run into likely, and likely to run into unlikely, and my word what a sentence. The point is: ransom. Three hundred and twenty-four easier ways to do it, and that’s just off the top of my head.” The Doctor waved his hand into the train carriage. “Strong stasis field in here. All the rest of you, stay back. Kishallon, with me.”

Kishallon followed him. “Are we going to release these people too?”

“It will get unwieldy,” the Doctor admitted, “remarkably fast, but I’m not sure I like the alternative. People _can_ be harmed inside a stasis field, you know. A sufficiently determined attacker, or a sufficiently strong one . . . and that’s if the field itself doesn’t malfunction in some way, which can be a more gruesome death sentence. Had you noticed the lights?”

“It’s a horrible color,” Kishallon said, “it makes everyone look green. And the people who are green, it makes a nastier green.”

“It’s also dim.”

“Well, yes.”

“I think it’s emergency low lighting. At the moment, I couldn’t begin to speculate on the nature of the emergency . . .” He broke off, concentrating on scanning the walls.  
“But you think it’s why nobody came to put us on exhibit. To brush us off and straighten us up and make us look as neat as—as these people.” None of the train carriage people looked jostled or jarred. There was even a full cup of liquid in front of one, and it hadn’t splashed at all.

“It’s a possibility. All right. Brace yourself for an influx of startled, angry Superstructure inhabitants—“

The sonic trilled, and the stasis units in the walls spun down. At first, for an instant, there was normal talk, and then someone screamed at the suddenness of the Doctor and Kishallon’s appearance—the person with the full drink spit it out, claiming it had been suddenly transmuted to colored water—someone stood up to demand to know what was going on—

And then the Steward, the princex, the Balhoonian, and the other people from Platform Seventeen rushed into the room, and things got _really_ chaotic.


	2. Chapter 2

All told, they were spending ten times as much time calming people down as they were taking down the stasis. And there were more stasis rooms. Many of them.

It was Kishallon who first noticed that they were heading steadily backwards in history. The Doctor tended to treat history as a scrambled assemblage that didn’t necessarily have to make a coherent whole, not while the individual bits were so interesting. Kishallon, however, had genuinely tried to go to university to become a data archeologist, and she thought of time in layers.

The displays, if displays were what they were, seemed to be mostly the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxy, with the exception being the Araxian Dominion display from the Greater Magellanic Cloud. The Doctor was hesitant about waking that particular court from stasis—the Rocali, who ruled the Araxian Dominion, were not known for their patience or kindness—but he reasoned that if he was saving people from something, he didn’t have the right to pick and choose who would be saved and who wouldn’t. So the Rocali joined the growing assemblage of people, and were now shooting suspicious looks around themselves with their dead black eyes, nervously clutching jeweled psi-amps that had been shown to do absolutely nothing.

The Princex had stayed close to the Doctor and Kishallon, perhaps with the notion that they were the people who knew what was going on. The Steward briefly tried to start an argument about whether he had authorized a police presence on Platform Seventeen, and what they were doing there in clear light of the fact that he hadn’t; the Doctor had airily claimed hot pursuit and happily left everyone with the assumption that he was police. Kishallon reflected that he could have claimed much more authority by admitting to being a Time Lord—if the claim was accepted, which it probably wouldn’t have been. Perhaps Kishallon’s instinct to use rank wasn’t always a solution . . .

And then they came to an empty room. It was set up like all the other rooms, an elaborate mock-up of a very high-class gathering—in this case, there were pillars of crystal and crystal on the walls. There were waist-high robots with drink trays on top of them, and the drinks glowed slightly. What there weren’t, were people. 

“Interesting,” the Doctor said quietly.

“I think this might be the Ko Je Te,” Kishallon said. One of Andromeda’s first empires. There were clothes and—yes, and masks, the Ko Je had worn masks as a matter of religion as well as practicality, to distinguish between clones of different eras and ranks— “Doctor, what are all these clothes doing on the floor?”

“What it looks like,” the Doctor said, “is that the people here escaped from stasis, disrobed, and went on their merry naked way.”

The stasis field was still up, Kishallon realized. She could feel the deadness in the air, the way the Doctor’s voice only carried a few feet. “What do you think really happened?” 

“I think the people here escaped from stasis, disrobed, and went on their merry naked way. What I’m more interested in is _how_ and why. The Ko Je are ordinary distant humanoids of an ornithoid persuasion, not especially resistant to energy, temporal effects, or anything else that would make them shrug off a stasis field. So, _how?_ And having escaped stasis, by their own design or someone else’s, what would prompt them to go cavorting in the nude? And by ‘in the nude,’” the Doctor added, “I mean ‘without masks.’ The Ko Je are _very_ insistent on that point.” He picked up a mask, as if to illustrate, and then looked more closely at the underside of it.

“Anything?” Kishallon said, moving closer.

“Do you happen to remember the color of Ko Je blood?”

“I studied mostly the early Dysonic. In the Milky Way.”

“Hmm.” The Doctor scraped his finger along the inside of the mask, picking up a viscous liquid of some kind. “Probably not gray. Not many things have gray blood.” He sniffed his finger, and then grimaced. “No, not blood. Organic, but not blood. Under the circumstances, I’m not inclined to lick it.”

Kishallon had images of some sort of horrible Ko Je-dissolving poison, but if it was, it must be time-delayed. The Doctor showed no ill effects as he deactivated the room’s stasis so that the others could move through. Kishallon decided to table that worry. She was more concerned about the Ko Je, at the moment.

Some of the clothing looked ripped. Had its owner ripped it in their hurry to disrobe? And if so, why? Had the clothing been used against them somehow—electrified, or some such? It didn’t look like smart-clothing to Kishallon, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. It was long before her time.

Was Kishallon going to end up running around nude and fighting some sort of clothing menace? She wasn’t completely prepared to rule it out, which said something about what her life had become.

They left the Ko Je Te room, now swarming with other people, and entered a room that Kishallon thought belonged to one of the Human Empires—probably the eighth, if they were still working on the theory that this was a museum and they were touching on the high points of the galaxy’s history. They released the stasis, endured the shouting.

“Someone,” a peevish woman was repeating over and over, “smeared me with gray slime. Someone smeared me with gray slime. I need to register a complaint; which of you is in charge?”

“Same gray slime?” Kishallon said quietly, to the Doctor.

The Doctor shrugged. “I doubt she’d let me smell her. But, probably.”

At least now they knew that the gray slime wasn’t the dissolved remains of the Ko Je. But there would have to be a lot more of it, for that. Not just a trace on the edge of a mask, or on the inside of clothing. Kishallon wondered if the Ko Je naturally secreted something, and had brushed against the old woman on the way out.

Which implied they were following the Ko Je, which implied they were on the right track to—something. Kishallon followed the Doctor to the next room with some anticipation. Her theory proved to be correct, in a way; the next room wasn’t a stasis display.

It was a huge viewing bay, a space station’s viewing bay, with one smooth arc of diamant for a window. The room was almost entirely dark, so that the outside could be seen. They were hanging in intergalactic space, and in front of them was a pair of galaxies merging.

For a moment, Kishallon just took in the view.

Those aren’t any of the Near Galaxies,” the Princex said, behind her. “We’re outside Virgo.” The woman with the slime problem was right next to them, possibly having decided that the Princex was in charge. They certainly carried themself that way.

“I wonder,” the Doctor said.

Wonder what?”

“All the displays we’ve seen have been, for lack of a better word, local. Andromeda. The Milky Way. Magellan. The Human Empires, the last one we came to, are one of the earliest political entities to make much of a difference in the Milky Way, arguing—as Kishallon has argued—that we’re proceeding backwards along a timeline. But a timeline of what?” 

“Well, of civilization in . . .” The Princex trailed off.

“What if,” the Doctor said, “it’s a record of civilization in _that_ —the merging galaxies of Andromeda and the Milky Way, far in your future? The event would disrupt civilization unimaginably, especially if people keep building large-scale megastructures like the brocades—easily destroyed by a passing star. What if someone decided to make a record?” 

“They would have to be able to transcend the A’adz Limit,” Kishallon noted, “but . . .” But she knew at least one time-craft that laughed at the A’adz Limit, and wouldn’t it be nice to have the TARDIS here right now. The theory was that the curvature of spacetime imposed a definite natural limit on how far anyone could travel back in time, which was what made data archeology a viable profession. If you couldn’t just go there and look, you relied on what you could dredge out of the data stores or neutron star libraries. Kishallon still hadn’t adjusted to the idea that she could go _as early as she liked._ “But,” she repeated, “who could do that? The Time Lords?”

The Doctor rejected that instantly. “Not nearly enough circles on the walls.”

“Time Lords are a myth,” the Princex objected.

“Most myths and legends have something to them,” the Doctor said. “There may not be fairies at the bottom of the garden, but there’s generally something at the bottom of the fairies.”

Some of the more adventurous of the people they’d revived—including the Steward, the Balhoonian, and several Rocali—had filed into the observation room. Kishallon heard the Rocali quietly threatening the wrath of the Dominion on their kidnappers, and the Steward—lauded Centra, the Steward was starting to sound reasonable—saying, _we’re all in the same boat, sir or madam or mestra._

Everyone seemed a little bit subdued. Seeing galaxies from the outside would do that to one, Kishallon supposed.

The Doctor wandered towards the windows. “If this is a museum,” he said over his shoulder to Kishallon, “the question becomes, who is it a museum _for._ Is it out here because some civilization has moved out here to avoid the galactic chaos? Seems like an energy-poor place to set up shop. Or is it less a museum and more an ark—pure preservation, no visitors welcome? Either way, it has to have back rooms. Things off exhibit, environmental controls, records, the control room for the Time Scoop—“ He reached the window and stopped talking, very suddenly. “Oh,” he said quietly.

Kishallon didn’t like the sound of that _oh._ It sounded like someone who had just worked out what was going on, and very much wished that he hadn’t. She joined the Doctor at the window and followed his gaze down.

The station spread out underneath them, dark and circular. There were lights here and there, greenish lights that only illuminated small parts of the structure. Together with the light of the merging galaxies, it was only just bright enough to make out the shape of the place.

It was bright enough, however, to see things moving on the outside of the station. Non-humanoid things. Creeping things—

There was one close enough to make out. It looked like an insect.

It seemed to meet Kishallon’s eyes.

“It wasn’t gray slime,” the Doctor said. “I forgot about the light. It was _green.”_

It sounded significant. Kishallon couldn’t look away from the creature outside the window. “Doctor,” she said, “what’s that?”

“We are all in very, very bad trouble,” the Doctor said, “and I’m not immediately certain how to get us out of it.”

The insect crept up to the window and looked in at the room. It struck Kishallon as intelligent—intelligent, unfriendly, and, of course, crawling unprotected through space. 

“Doctor,” Kishallon repeated, _“what’s that?”_

Something emerged from the far door of the observation bay.

In the dark, it was hard to make out, but it definitely wasn’t humanoid. A dark mass the size of a person, which hunched forward like a worm. The Doctor raised his voice. _“Everyone back through that door!”_

Anyone with sense, Kishallon thought, would have done it immediately. But these were dignitaries and nobles of various empires, and they weren’t accustomed to obeying anyone, so there was a little bit of _why should I_ and _who do you think you are_ before everyone spotted the worm-thing advancing on them, and then everyone sprinted for the door at once and tried to jam themselves through simultaneously. Traffic, predictably, jammed.

The thing hunched closer.

Kishallon yanked the Princex backwards—they yelped in indignation—and shoved the two people stuck in the door, hard. It cleared the door, and the princex rushed through. But there were still a few other people, a Ciriphon Empire worthy in a jeweled hat, an ancient man in a float-chair—

The insect was still watching through the window. It cocked its head toward the man in the float-chair.

The worm-thing surged forward. The man in the float-chair screamed.

The worm-thing spat slime at the man in the float-chair, hitting him on the face. He kept screaming. Kishallon darted to him, grabbed the controls, and sent the float-chair rocketing off-balance toward the door. Someone, possibly the Ciriphon in the hat, tried to close the door at the exact moment that the chair reached it, sending the old man sprawling onto the ground beyond it and blocking the door again. Kishallon could hear the Princex yelling at someone about shutting out their allies, and someone had the foresight to open it again—the Doctor grabbed the chair controls and sent it backwards out of the doorway—and he and Kishallon managed to duck through just as someone closed the door _again._ The door panel slid from top to bottom and hit the ground centimeters from Kishallon’s heel.

“Block the door,” the Doctor said.

“I demand,” the old man said, a bit breathlessly, “you go back out and get my chair.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” That was the Princex. “That thing is still out there.”

“So is my chair!”

“It didn’t actually hurt him,” the Steward said, “it just—slimed him. How much of a menace—“

The woman from before screamed. And kept screaming.

She was holding her hand up, and Kishallon first thought was, _that’s funny, I thought she was a close humanoid._ The hand was—more a mass than a hand. A grayish—no, greenish—mass, not smooth, but filled with little bubbly blisters, vacuoles of some kind, a completely inhumanish kind of flesh—

The woman’s hand had been transformed into something else. Something horrifying.

TShe kept screaming.

“Doctor,” Kishallon breathed.

“Wirrn,” the Doctor said.

Someone from the Ciriphon Empire said, _“Oh._ Oh, Elodia,” and then went on in another language, something that didn’t translate—a prayer learned by rote, Kishallon thought.

“What are Wirrn?” Kishallon said.

The door started opening suddenly. Several people slapped the closing controls at once, and the Doctor produced his sonic screwdriver to lock it. “Capable of opening doors,” the Doctor said, “for a start. Someone pick up the Hierophant, but _don’t_ touch the slime on his face. Let’s get back through a few more doors, and then we’ll talk.”

“What about her?” the Princex said, pointing at the woman.

The Doctor hesitated. Then he told the woman gently, “You have to tell us when their thoughts start to seep into your head.”

“‘When?’” the woman managed.

“You can’t take them along, they’re _infected!”_ That was the Ciriphon Empire woman, the one who had been praying.

"Doctor, _what’s a Wirrn?”_

“They lay an egg,” the Ciriphon Empire woman said, “in a person’s body. The larva eats the person. Anyone touched by the larva’s slime becomes another larva. Wirrn exist to make everyone they touch into Wirrn.”

“And,” the Doctor said, “anything that the victims know, all the Wirrn know. What I think happened—there’s slime seeping under that door. Nobody touch that.” Everyone backed off, much further than necessary. “What I think happened: a group of people were scooping others out of time to be used as exhibits. Call them the Museum Keepers. They tried to find significant ceremonies for each culture. Unfortunately, they caught the Ko Je Te right before the Te fell, and the ceremony they chose was the Hatching of the Preserver—a sort of sacrificial tribute to the Wirrn. Apparently, the Wirrn are immune to stasis, and the larva hatched. It converted the Ko Je. The Museum Keepers came in to see what was wrong with their prized exhibit. Exeunt Museum Keepers, pursued by green worms.

“Having caught and converted the station’s staff—having, not coincidentally, secured knowledge of how to operate all station systems—the Wirrn resumed the Time Scoop program, and caught the viewing party on Platform Seventeen. They intended us all to stay in stasis until we were suitably infected, of course, but we haven’t thrown that much of a wrinkle into their plans. The larvae can hunt us down and convert us while the Wirrn themselves concentrate on the Time Scoop—which can almost certainly be reversed, used to put Wirrn onto Platform Seventeen or the Ciriphon Night Palace or the Superstructure. Which means that you’re not the only ones in danger; your worlds are all in peril too.”

There was a long silence, broken only by the infected woman’s sobbing.

“On the bright side,” the Doctor said, “I have a screwdriver and pockets full of confectionary, and that has to count for something. Come on, everyone. We have to find the door to the museum’s back rooms. Off-exhibit decorations. Machine shop. Power generator.”

“Are you mad?” the woman from the Ciriphon Empire asked. “We need to do what the Ko Je did!”

“Don’t,” the Doctor said. In a low, warning tone.

“What did the Ko Je do?” That was the Balhoonian.

“The ceremony. He even talked about it. The Hatching of the Preserver. If you give the Wirrn a truly selfless person, they keep their selflessness through the transformation. They can stop the Wirrn.”

“You’re all billionaires,” the Doctor said, “so that approach is dead in the water, isn’t it?” The Steward hesitated, then opened his mouth. “Don’t you dare,” the Doctor said.

The Steward pointed at Kishallon. “That woman,” he said, in a rush, “is an Indigo-grade Utility. Perfected for service from the moment their genes are laid. They don’t even speak without permission.”

“Yes, I do!” Kishallon said. But the room had turned against her. She could feel it. Desperate people, desperate for some sort of solution—she tried to catch the princex’s eye, hoping for an ally, but they just looked frightened.

“You,” the Doctor said quietly, “are a very lucky man, Steward.”

“How?”

“You’re lucky that I don’t believe in giving people what they deserve. When this is all over, when you’re back safe in your bed, I want you to remember that. I want you to thank your _gods_ for that.”

Nobody actually backed away from the Doctor. But they were wondering if they should.

“Also,” the Doctor said, in a less softly angry tone, “you’re lucky I locked that door. Since I’m the only one who can unlock it, and I’m not going to, nobody is going to be throwing anyone to the Wirrn. Now. Service door. The station is more or less barrel-shaped, and we’ve been traipsing around the outer circle. An elevator would be toward the inside, I think—that wall, where the stasis generators weren’t. Let’s see . . .” He started scanning. “Nothing in this room. Onward to the Ko Je Te, then.”

The Steward blocked his way. “You will open that door,” he said, trying for menace, “and allow us to implement our solution.”

“No,” the Doctor said, “I really won’t.” He brushed past the Steward, only to have the Steward grab his arm.

“The majority is against you, Doctor!”

The Doctor looked at the hand on his arm, then up into the Steward’s face. The Steward met his eyes, and flinched.

The Doctor shook himself free. “Come along, Kishallon.”

Kishallon followed him.


	3. Chapter 3

“They’re going to work up their courage soon,” Kishallon told the Doctor in a near whisper.

“I’m well aware of that. I’m hoping we find the service door before that happens.”

< Kishallon nodded jerkily. She could hear arguments behind them.

A rather large part of her was telling her that she should surrender to their plan. Kishallon thought it was probably early conditioning, not ethics, but it still had a hold on her. She and the Doctor were the closest thing to selfless they were going to encounter in this assemblage, unless one of the waiters qualified. The Doctor was needed to save them all. Therefore, the logical choice . . . “Doctor . . .”

“Kishallon—and I say this with the greatest of respect and affection—shut up.”

“How did you know what I was going to say?” Kishallon wondered.

“Sometimes you’re predictable. No door here.”

To someone like a Time Lord, Kishallon reflected, she was probably perfectly predictable, down to the last decimal place.

They moved on to the next room, and that’s when the screaming started behind them. Kishallon half-turned. “What—“

“The gentlewoman from the Human Empire,” the Doctor said, “has turned. Run!”

There seemed to be a full-scale riot breaking out in the room behind them, but some people managed to get through the doors. Kishallon heard the Steward yell, _“Get her!”_ and she ran. _“Get her! Give her to the creature!”_

_“Oh, Elodia, oh, elodia . . .”_

_“It touched me! No, no, no, no . . .”_

_“Get the Indigo!”_

“Here!” the Doctor gasped, and they both turned sideways abruptly. A near-invisible panel rose—the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver propelling it upward—

Kishallon heard the Princex’s high-pitched scream, and turned around for a moment—just long enough to see that their neck was discolored, with bubbly green growth instead of skin. They must have touched the woman from the Human Empire, Kishallon realized, and now they were infected—

The Steward grabbed her. There were hands all over her, all of the sudden, the half dozen or so who had led the chase. _“Throw her to the beast!”_ someone yelled, and there was a roar of approval—

And then there was a horrendous, high-pitched noise that made everyone—including Kishallon—grab their ears in pain. Someone seized Kishallon’s elbow, and pulled her hard, and then she was through the service door with the Doctor, and the Doctor was dropping the smoking sonic screwdriver on the floor. The noise cut off.

Kishallon looked down at the sonic and said, “Oh.”

“Oh, indeed. I can’t lock anything behind us now, so let’s hurry, shall we?”

§

Two floors down—via ladder, the elevator wasn’t working—and several corridors toward the center of the station, they found a machine shop. The Doctor declared it the find of the century, and waded in. “The Wirrn are vulnerable to electricity,” he told Kishallon, “so that’s what we’ll use. A discharge device. Find the biggest power cell in the place, we’ll start there.”

Kishallon obediently started opening drawers. “If the Museum Keepers are from the time when Andromeda crashes into the Milky Way,” she said, “I don’t think I’ll be able to recognize a power cell.”

“Find the biggest thing that looks like it might conceivably be a power cell, and we’ll start there.”

Kishallon nodded. Long skinny things, those looked more like tools than power cells. Little coils, probably not. Transparent thing—that looked very like a current meter, so Kishallon took it to probe anything that might yield electricity. “Are they dying back there?” she asked.

“I hope it’s like dying. The alternative seems rather worse. Trapped inside the Wirrn . . .” The Doctor was assembling something, apparently out of whatever he could grab. It looked like a large hand-light.

“Is there any way to go back and save them?”

“Save them? Possibly, possibly. Very little is impossible. Go back? No.” The Doctor clipped a coil of some kind into his assemblage, and dropped several possible tools into his pocket. “That damnable Steward put the idea in everyone’s head, and now they think you’re the answer to their problems. Both so pure and noble that you can turn the Wirrn, and so disposable that none of them care if you die. Billionaires.” He made the word into an epithet.

“It’ll take them at least a little while to figure out how to get through the service door.”

“Not if they take the Eft of Balhoon’s chair,” the Doctor said grimly, “and batter it down.”

Oh. Well, there was that.

Kishallon found a broad item like a flattened egg, which had two connectors which _might_ resemble power cell leads. “Does this look like a power cell to you?”

“It could be . . .” The Doctor uncoiled a length of wire. “Let’s plug it in and find out.”

A pair of clips proved ineffective at attaching the wires to the smooth ovoid. Opining, “we should at least see if it works before we solder it,” the Doctor gingerly touched the wire ends to the leads. The light-thing produced a sudden bolt of electricity, searing white and eye-piercing after so long in the dull green light of the museum, and the Doctor dropped the wires with a sound of satisfaction. “First, to turn it off,” he said, twisting something up near the neck of the lamp, “and then to attach. I don’t actually know how many shots we’ll have, so we’ll want to save electricity as much as possible—Kishallon?”

Kishallon wasn’t listening to him. She was staring at the Doctor’s left hand.

“Ah.” The Doctor made as if to put his hand in his pocket, then realized he was going to have to use it. “Well, yes. That is a complication.”

It was barely visible in the dark olive light of the machine shop, but the electricity discharge had shown it clearly. There was a line of dark green blisters along the Doctor’s left forefinger, where he had first touched the Wirrn slime on the Ko Je mask.

“But,” Kishallon said, sounding funny to herself, “your immune system can fight it, right? I mean, you’re a Time Lord. You’re the most advanced race ever to live!”

“Advanced in some ways. The word ‘advanced,’ is an interesting little term that tells you more about what the speaker values than what the subject of conversation has actually done.” The Doctor seemed to know what futuristic soldering gear looked like, because he wielded the tool without any doubt about which end got hot—something Kishallon couldn’t have intuited from looking at the instrument. “No,” the Doctor said, after a moment of concentration, “my immune system can’t handle it. Delay it, but not stop it. I had hoped the anti-Dalek elements in my bloodstream might step up, but apparently those only work on Dalek nanites. Irritating.”

“But—“

“There’s a fix, of course.”

Kishallon relaxed. “Oh, good.”

“I’m not going to use it. Not yet. But there is a fix.”

“Why—“ Kishallon cut herself off. “Because the Wirrn won’t bother you if you’re infected. They just have to wait.”

“That’s very good. I hadn’t thought of that. No, I’m not going to use it because I want to get inside the Wirrn telepathic network.” The Doctor finished soldering the second connection. “And make no mistake, that could put an end to me for good. I don’t mind telling you, I’m quite terrified.”

He didn’t sound terrified. As usual, he sounded like a kindly old man who’d invited you over for chelisti and caron. “Then why do it?” Kishallon said desperately. “We know what the Wirrn want, don’t we? They want to expand. They want to assimilate everyone until there’s nothing but Wirrn.”

“That is,” the Doctor admitted, “the impression I got the last time I attempted something a tenth as foolish as this. But, no. I’m not concerned with contacting the Wirrn. I’m concerned with their victims.” He put the soldering iron in his pocket and picked up the electricity shooter—only to nearly drop it.

Kishallon couldn’t remember ever seeing the Doctor drop anything. And he definitely hadn’t seen the expression of agony that the Doctor momentarily wore, before he smoothed it over into a strained version of his normal avuncular persona. “What? What happened?”

“As the Wirrn infection works to dissolve one’s flesh,” the Doctor said, and he sounded a bit strained as well, “it thins the bones, apparently. I just broke several in my left hand.” He passed the device over to Kishallon. “You’re going to have to use the electrifier, I think. It’s a two-handed weapon.”

“I—it’s—“ Kishallon would have been less horrified by all this if the Doctor weren’t taking it so _calmly._ “How do I use it?”

“Aim the lamp toward your target. Twist the attachment here to discharge electricity. You have a range of about three meters, and an entirely unknown number of shots which will do no more than _stun_ the Wirrn—and for how long, I don’t know. All in all, it’s critically important not to waste electricity.”

Kishallon nodded. “Where are we going?”

“Time Scoop central control.”

“Do you know where that is?”

“Not in the slightest,” the Doctor said.


	4. Chapter 4

The journey down through the station was a peculiar mixture of nightmare and monotony.

The elevators had been turned off by the Wirrn, which were just as happy climbing up the outside of the station. Kishallon imagined them out there, swarming over the carcass of the Museum. It was hard not to think that there should be tapping and scraping noises as they crawled up and down. The only practical effect, however, was that the Doctor and Kishallon had to use the emergency ladders.

After they used the ladders, they had to circle the inner ring of the station and check the rooms. The outer ring seemed to be reserved for exhibits. When they checked it, they came across a room that looked like a construction site, full of dummy models of struct meeps, lacking only a few Cerulean-grade Utilities to act as site boss and directors.

“The Museum Keepers,” the Doctor said, “are slightly better archeologists than I gave them credit for, then.”

“Because they aren’t just concentrating on the nobility?” At the moment, Kishallon didn’t care whether the Museum Keepers had been geniuses or idiots. The Doctor’s hand was starting to look more like a tumorous mass, and that was the Museum Keepers’ fault.

“You don’t understand a civilization by understanding the nobility,” the Doctor affirmed. “They just ride along on the top and cause trouble.”

Said the man whose species called itself the Time Lords. Then again, maybe he’d know better than anyone.

Kishallon was ready to add the Time Lords to the list of people she hated right now. The Time Lords, for not building themselves better immune systems—or perhaps for building their immune systems just well enough that the Doctor handled strange slimes as a matter of course. The Museum Keepers, for scooping a Wirrn-making party. The Ko Je, for propitiating the Wirrn. Herself, for not picking up the mask and getting infected instead of the Doctor.

They went back to the middle sections of the Museum, and found the power plant. The Doctor declared it potentially useful as a backup—but he needed the Time Scoop. “And besides,” he said, with what Kishallon was beginning to feel was a slightly ghoulish blitheness, “the Time Scoop will be wired up to a vast amount of power. I can electrocute myself as well there as here.”

“Electrocute yourself?” It came out as a squawk.

“Yes, didn’t I mention? The plan, and make no mistake, it’s a bit of a desperation ploy . . .” The Doctor trailed off. Then he said, “I can hear them singing, you know.”

“The Wirrn?” Kishallon’s heart sank.

“Who else? It’s not a world-song, their music. Not for planets, or ringworlds, or spheres. It’s a song of stars and the empty dark between them. They drift for eons inside those melodies . . .”

_“Doctor!”_ Kishallon said, and the Doctor looked at her in mild surprise. “Don’t—don’t get lost in it.”

“I’m fine. The danger comes later, as more of me is consumed.”

“Yes, but—there’s already some green on your neck. Doctor, you were telling me about getting electrocuted. _Why_ do you need to get electrocuted?”

“For energy,” the Doctor said. “One thing Time Lord bodies are aces at: channeling energy. I’ve even been struck by lightning once. Can’t say I enjoyed it, but . . .”

He was trailing off too much. Too vague. Kishallon didn’t like the way his gaze wandered off, as if there were unseen things occupying his attention. “Come on,” she said, “let’s find that control room.”

“Couldn’t have put it better myself.”

They were two levels further down when they met their first Wirrn. It reared up, clacking at Kishallon, and the Doctor said, “Fire!” at her, and she took a frantic instant to remember exactly which part of the electrifier to twist, and she wasn’t going to make it, she wasn’t going to make it, she was going to get infected and fail the Doctor and it was all going to be her fault, and then she remembered how and fired the electrifier and brilliant white light left spots in front of her eyes as it leaped to the Wirrn, and the Wirrn fell to the ground in a heap of limbs, smoking slightly.

Kishallon stared at it. It didn’t show any sign of life. _“That’s_ stunned?” she asked.

“They don’t breathe, remember?” The Doctor brushed past the Wirrn. “Wirrn,” he said over his shoulder, “are tough. Yes, we charred it a little, but that wasn’t enough of a bolt to kill it.”

They went on.

The next Wirrn went down more smoothly. “I think,” the Doctor said, “we’re on the right track. I have a map of this place in my head now. It’s blurry, but coming clearer every moment.”

“Because the Wirrn know the layout.”

“Because the Wirrn know the layout,” the Doctor confirmed.

“Is it— _wise_ to access the Wirrn knowledge?”

“My dear girl, none of this is wise. The _wise_ thing would have been to stop off at the power plant and blow us all to flinders. Damage control. Necessary sacrifices.”

“You wouldn’t do that,” Kishallon said.

“I have . . . experienced the lure of that sort of thought. Given in to it, on occasion, and not been entirely sure I was wrong. The good of the swarm . . .”

“We’re not a _swarm,”_ Kishallon said. “Stop listening to them.”

“At this point, I can’t. They’re in my head whether I want them or not. The point is, who is to say whether my insistence on finding a better solution is virtue, or arrogance? Someday it’s not going to work, Kishallon. Someday, I’m going to fail, and the power plant will prove to have been the better option, after all—and when that happens, will it still be good that I tried to save everybody?”

Kishallon thought about it. “Yes,” she decided.

“I like you, Kishallon. Sometimes you make it so uncomplicated. Very well, then. We choose the unlikely hope over the grim calculation. We save them.”

“How?” Kishallon said.

The Doctor blinked at her. “Didn’t I mention?”

“You mentioned electrocuting yourself,” Kishallon said. “Will that purge the Wirrn from your body?”

“No. I do that myself. I use the extra energy to distribute the regeneration . . .” Another worrying trail-off. “I looked forward,” the Doctor said, “to having more time. You’re a good girl, Kishallon, but you’re fragile in many ways, and I don’t know if the next one is going to be good for you. I start wishing there was a way to hang over my own shoulder and critique . . .”

Kishallon didn’t know how to parse any of that, except for the bit about wanting more time, and that part she didn’t like at all. “Doctor. This plan of yours. Are you going to survive it?”

There was a long pause. Then the Doctor said, “‘Survive’ is— _behind you on the ceiling!”_

Kishallon spun, and brought the electrifier up. The Wirrn on the ceiling was almost close enough to reach her, and lashed downward with an appendage before Kishallon triggered the electrifier, bright enough to see its carapace as green rather than just dark, and it clattered off the ceiling just as Kishallon realized that there was another one behind it, and triggered the electrifier again—she missed, and the thing surged forward—triggered it again, arcs of white lightning, and the Wirrn fell, and Kishallon shot at the other one behind it on the ceiling and then the one on the floor was nearly on her and—

And then it was over. Just four Wirrn—it had felt like a horde—all on the ground, none of them even twitching.

Kishallon turned back around toward the Doctor, and flinched despite herself. The Wirrn contagion was traveling up the side of the Doctor’s face, towards his left eye.

“Do I look that bad?” the Doctor said, and Kishallon realized that his speech was ever-so-slightly slurred, as if his tongue was being affected too. “Don’t answer that. The benefit to hearing the Wirrn: I know where they are. The downside is that they know where I am. They’re concentrating on me, Kishallon. I can feel it, like a weight.”

“Because they can feel you, too,” Kishallon realized, his heart sinking. “Doctor—do they know what you’re planning?”

“Not yet, but they know there’s a plan. And there’s more to it than that. I think . . .” For a moment, Kishallon didn’t think he was going to finish that thought. “I think they want to make me their queen. The knowledge of the queen passes to the next generation, and they want it. They crave it.”

It made sense, Kishallon thought. The most knowledgeable person, the most powerful person, being the one who led the Wirrn—or was that queen as in making new Wirrn? Either way—both ways—the Doctor’s knowledge was a prize to be sought.

“They’ve all come inside,” the Doctor said after a while. “And they’ve reactivated the elevators.”

“To get Wirrn to us more quickly.”

“To get the larvae to us. I think there are only a limited number of adult Wirrn. Not many Museum Keepers, perhaps. But larvae . . . they have hundreds of larvae now . . .” After a moment, the Doctor added, “It may be enough.”

_“No._ Don’t think like that. Don’t let the Wirrn get through to you.”

“Kishallon, I can barely tell who’s thinking what at this point. The point is, if there are enough of them, the metacrisis will be distributed and it won’t burn anyone’s brain . . . we need to hurry.”

He groped for Kishallon’s hand with his right hand, and Kishallon almost took it before realizing that there were dark streaks on it. “Doctor—I can’t. You’re—“

“Infected. Yes. Don’t worry about that— _run!”_

They ran.

The elevator doors opened at the far end of the hall as they ran towards it, and Kishallon realized why the Doctor had been concerned. The Wirrn larvae could just block the door to the Time Scoop controls, and how would they shift them without infecting themselves? She saw the larvae clearly for the first time as they emerged from the elevator, and nearly gagged. Wormlike, covered with pale blisters, looking as if they outmassed the people they had come from—boneless, hunching, horrible, eyeless, with featureless mouths like a pit. Was one of them the woman from the Human Empire? Was one of them the Princex? It didn’t matter; they’d been robbed of everything that made them people, even their faces.

Kishallon triggered the electrifier. She didn’t even notice the Doctor opening the door beside her; she just wanted to shoot and shoot until they were all gone. Horrible things. Horrible things. She realized distantly that she was yelling wordlessly, and triggered the electrifier again and again.

She almost shot the last figure to emerge from the elevator. But this one was walking, not squirming, and Kishallon flinched away, aiming the bolt into the ceiling instead.

The Steward staggered out of the elevator.

His face was half dissolved, and it looked like his _head_ was slumping and misshapen as well. “You!” It was more a ghastly sort of moan than a word. “Could have stopped . . .” the Steward slurred. “Could have stopped . . .”

Kishallon froze.

“You did this to me!”

He lurched forward, slashing the air with distorted pseudopods rather than hands. Kishallon stood frozen.

The Doctor came back out of the door, grabbed the neck of the electrifier, and twisted. Lightning leapt out.

The Steward hit the ground. He still seemed to be breathing.

“Why didn’t you fire?” the Doctor said quietly.

“He looked like a person,” Kishallon said numbly. _You did this to me._

“Come on inside. We don’t have a lot of time.” The Doctor moved over to the console as he talked, and then ducked underneath it, pulling a tool from the machine room out of his pocket. “If anything tries to open that door, hit the close button immediately. They’re trying to seduce me now.” Whatever the tool was, it opened the panel under the console. “Be queen of the Wirrn, and have an army! Every injustice that I can think of, falling beneath the green swarm. That’s very clever persuasion. I didn’t know they had it in them.”

“Don’t listen to them,” Kishallon said desperately.

“I’m trying. I’m trying. I’m slipping away, Kishallon. I don’t know if I can do this.”

“Please. You have to hold on.”

“The music is so beautiful.”

“Doctor, please.”

“Imagine being completely free of distractions. No empathy, no compassion, nothing but the purpose.”

“I’ve tried being alive only for one purpose,” Kishallon said, “it was rubbish. Doctor, you have to stay yourself. You have to stay alive.”

“No,” the Doctor said, “I don’t. That’s the point.”

Kishallon stared at him helplessly.

“I have to use the extra energy from this power lead,” he held up an intimidatingly large cord, “to boost a metacrisis throughout the Wirrn telepathic network. It will effectively use regeneration energy to revert all the Wirrn, all the Wirrn larvae, and all the infected. Back to normal in a blaze of light. But _I_ have to regenerate.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Kishallon said. The legends mentioned regeneration, but what it really was, beyond some sort of healing . . .

“It means,” the Doctor said, “that there is one time at which any Time Lord’s body can defeat any infection. But that time—is a sort of death.”

“I don’t want you to die,” Kishallon said.

The Doctor let out a breath of laughter. “I don’t want to die either. But it’s time, Kishallon. I can’t hold it off much longer.” He held up the cord, cutting a long slit in the covering. “Here’s to unlikely hopes—“

And then he put his hand onto the raw metal wire.

Lightning surrounded him, arcing from every part of him. It was _loud,_ horribly loud—Kishallon could see that the Doctor’s mouth was open, but he couldn’t tell if he was screaming.

He was glowing. Not just with lightning, but with a softer golden sheen.

And then he threw his head back, and screamed out light. Lightning and the golden glow twisted upwards, outwards, through the walls and the floors, hundreds of ribbons of light. Kishallon ducked, but none of them touched her—they all seemed to be targeted, almost, as if they were connecting to larvae and Wirrn victims all through the space station. Kishallon thought, _it’s working,_ although part of her couldn’t see why she cared that it was working, with the Doctor self-immolating in front of her—

She couldn’t see the Doctor amid the light. But she could make out the moment that the blazing Doctor’s size and dimensions shifted suddenly, and she thought, _something’s gone wrong._

The power cord dropped to the floor. The light subsided.

And the queen of the Wirrn was standing in front of Kishallon, wearing the Doctor’s old clothes. Kishallon hadn’t expected her to look humanish, but who else could she be?

She stared at Kishallon with an intensity she had never seen from any person not in a cult, and said, _“Watch out for the clams!”_

Kishallon actually found herself looking around, in near panic, for whatever clams were.

“No. Yes! Labels!” She spun to the console. “Where would a museum be without labels?” Pushing buttons, very very rapidly. “A time trace on everything they ever scooped. So there we go, and there we go—“

She was sending the Wirrn larvae to the times their hosts had come from, Kishallon realized belatedly. Platform Seventeen. The Ciriphon court. Kishallon had to stop her, she had to—

She was moving towards the Wirrn queen when the lurch took her.


	5. Chapter 5

Princex Tras En Liat of Telifi woke up on the floor.

Around them, people were pushing themselves upright. The Steward, looking grayish and shaken—the Eft of Balhoon—they were all the shape they ought to be, and Tras’s vision was right again, not green and distorted. There was no Great Purpose, no swarm, none of the things that they had—dreamed?

Maybe that was it. Maybe the station had been caught in a dream bomb. Everyone had simply collapsed, and had a nightmare of distant Museums and running and falling to the green horrors in the green half-light.

There was no trace of the Doctor or his Indigo assistant. That argued for the dream theory, but Tras wasn’t entirely sure . . .

Outside the window, unnoticed by most of the shaken partygoers, the fireweavers stretched the first strand of a new ringworld.

§

te Shanit la Ekobe had submitted herself to the ceremony of her own will. She was one of fairly few Ko Je to do so, in the past eight-eights of years or so—the Wirrn were becoming bolder, the hierarchs said, because so few people had the true selflessness necessary to sacrifice themselves.

Deep in her liver, Ekobe wasn’t sure if her selflessness was true, or simply wanting all her sisters to survive. But somebody had to do it, and so she had waited on the dais for the Wirrn to take her, for everything she was to dissolve—

And now she was back on the dais. But the Wirrn was no longer inside her. She had a few scrambled memories—green, green, green, and then golden light?

If a Preserver-elect was rejected by the Wirrn, they could never be offered again. Ekobe knew that much. What would happen with the Wirrn, she had no idea—but she was going home to her family.

§

Najan of the Araxian Dominion had escaped the threat entirely, due to being faster and better than the weaklings around him. He remembered clearly, even if they didn’t. The station outside the two Great Galaxies. The hunching green things.

He still didn’t know what Wirrn _were,_ but the fact that his fellows had succumbed—that would give him an advantage in the eternal struggle for dominance. Raise those memories, and he would surely have the others quivering at his feet.

Unless—was it his imagination, or did the ones who had transformed seem to have a little extra psionic strength now? As if they had been infused with something else, something non-Rocali—

If they were less Rocali, Najan thought, that might still be a way to subdue them. He would do what he did best. He would fall back, and observe.

§

Four-one-one-three was not the sort of person who stood up for anything. They had a job, they did it.

But after standing through One-five-two’s speech about enemy sabotage, and the needs of the Collection, and back to the Time Scoop for another round of captures—Four-one-one-three found, to their very great surprise, that they were walking out of the room.

—Exactly where do you think you’re going?— The sending was on a private channel, but the others could detect the crackling of anger even if they couldn’t catch the words. Four-one-one-three could tell by the way they shifted uncomfortably.

“I’m not going to,” Four-one-one-three said, broadband.

“Repeat and explain, four-digit.”

“I’m not going to dredge up another bloom-horror from the distant past and just hope a stasis field will hold it. I watched my friends be taken by those things. I won’t watch it again.” And, for a wonder, _the room was with them._ The other four-digits were sending approval, still understated, but growing. Four-one-one-three fielded several _thank you_ beams. “And besides,” they said—surprising themselves even more, “the Collection is cruel to the ones left behind. I quit.”

They walked out. But not before they heard the chorus from behind: _“I quit—I quit—I quit—“_

§

“And us,” the Wirrn queen finished, “right on the TARDIS. Pinpoint accuracy.”

Kishallon was on the TARDIS.

She looked around, her heart sinking. With the TARDIS, the Wirrn could go anywhere. Any time. Find any species that might oppose them, turn them into more Wirrn. Turn everything into Wirrn. Everyone Kishallon had ever known, everyone she hadn’t known—

“Let’s go to Earth,” the Wirrn queen said, flipping TARDIS switches as if she knew how all of them worked—which, thanks to the Doctor’s knowledge, she did. “Let’s find the very first of something, and see it happen. Let’s go faster, go further—“

Kishallon wasn’t listening. She had failed to sacrifice herself, failed to save all the people on the Museum. She couldn’t fail in this.

She had been wrong. She had been so childishly, fatuously wrong. Sometimes the only way out was to blow up the power plant.

Which was why, just as the Wirrn queen pulled down the dematerialization lever, Kishallon lifted the electrifier that she was still holding and blasted the TARDIS’s time rotor.

TO BE CONTINUED . . .


End file.
